Finnish EISCAT campaign week

This week, we will run a number of Finnish EISCAT experiments both in mainland and Svalbard. KAIRA will support most of the experiments. Monday-Tuesday Antti Kero will run ionospheric heating campaign titled heatncool. Wednesday-Thursday Lassi Roininen et al. have the TomoScand verification campaign. Alexander Kozlovsky will do measurements up in the islands in Longyearbyen. Anita Aikio et al. will make remote runs from Oulu.

Just to give you a clue of some experiments:

Heatncool - 25 and 26 Nov

To measure the D-region heating and cooling rates in a sub-millisecond resolution by superposing a sufficient number of short heater on/off modulations together. Raw data sampling makes the superposition possible.

TomoScand - 27 and 28 Nov

The objective is to verify the TomoScand ionospheric tomography reconstructions against the EISCAT measurements. 27 Nov mourning, we will point EISCAT mainland VHF to zenith with simultaneous KAIRA measurements allowing bistatic incoherent scatter radar measurements. With UHF we follow the trajectories of flybys of a COSMOS satellite. In order to guarantee transmitter stability, we will use regular EISCAT experiments (beata, bella etc).

28 Nov the measurement setup is similar to 27 Nov, except that we will do a daytime experiment. In addition, ESR Svalbard incoherent scatter radar will point at Az 180 El 78 (nearly field-aligned). This pointing direction is towards the Pan-Nordic TomoScand chains, thus allows good additional information for verification studies!

In addition to EISCAT and KAIRA, we will use Tromsø and Sodankylä ionosondes and GPS measurements (gps data handled by our visiting scientist Melessew Nigussie from Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia).

EISCAT heating control!

New ionospheric tomography station - Longyearbyen, Svalbard

The sixth receiver of the TomoScand network of the Finnish Meteorological Institute will be installed in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway, in September. Expedition preparation commenced early August by testing the receiver at SGO. Today we will send the instrument to Helsinki for further testing. Expedition to Svalbard will commence September 12 with a return flight five days later. Instrument will be installed in the Kjell Henriksen Observatory.

The total number of FMI & SGO ionospheric tomography receivers will be 11 after the (hopefully) successful expedition to Svalbard! Detailed info on the technology of the tomography receiver at Jitter website http://www.sgo.fi/~j/jitter/web/!

TomoScand and SGO tomography receivers with the new Longyearbyen station (LYR). Map also shows the  IMAGE magnetometer network station locations.

Finnish Meteorological Institute

Co-located with SGO is Ilmatieteen laitos — the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI). Today we are delighted to be able to give a small presentation of the work done by them.

Space weather research at FMI includes both modelling and monitoring activities. The Institute owns and operates the only global Magneto-Hydro-Dynamic (MHD) simulation code in Europe and has conducted pioneering work in the theoretical modelling of Geomagnetically Induced Currents (GIC). On the observational side the main asset is the MIRACLE network of auroral cameras and magnetometers which is operated in the Northern Fennoscandia as international collaboration project where FMI serves as the PI-institute. Ionospheric researchers of the Institute have developed several methods for extracting value added data products from the network observations (e.g. latitude-longitude maps of equivalent ionospheric currents and auroral precipitation flux). These tools have been used in several research projects which typically utilise also EISCAT Incoherent Scatter data and various satellite observations in the research of meso-scale magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling processes.

During recent years the trend in MIRACLE research has been to move from the two-dimensional picture to three dimensional imaging of ionospheric conditions. For this reason, FMI has started closer collaboration with SGO in a project (TOMOSCAND) which will develop tomographic analysis methods for ionospheric electron density reconstructions. The aim is to use data from both GPS and Beacon receivers in the analysis and in a later stage perhaps also the standard MIRACLE observations can be integrated to the system. The future vision is to use TOMOSCAND measurements together with EISCAT_3D for monitoring radiowave propagation conditions in the Northern Europe. FMI participates as an associate member to the EISCAT_3D Preparatory Phase activities. The KAIRA project is of particular interest to FMI because the technical development of the system has synergy with the TOMOSCAND work and the array in Kilpisjärvi is located in the core area of the current MIRACLE and forthcoming TOMOSCAND field-of-views.

Links:

• http://www.space.fmi.fi/MIRACLE
  
• http://aurora.fmi.fi

With thanks to Kirsti Kauristie and FMI.